The leader of Rogers Communications will have a meeting with Canada's industry minister after a massive outage has paralyzed the company's network and disrupted several crucial services.
Some customers have reported that they are still experiencing service disruptions even though the company has said that the issue has been resolved.
Rogers Communications Outage
According to CBC, Canada's industry minister François-Philippe Champagne said in a statement that he will meet with Tony Staffieri, the leader of Rogers Communications, and other telecom leaders to talk about the importance of improving the "reliability of networks" across the country.
In the statement, Champagne said that the widespread service disruption, which lasted for 15 hours and knocked out the access to several law enforcement, banking, and health care service, is unacceptable. He added that he has expressed that view to Staffieri.
Champagne added that the services are "vitally important for Canadians" in their daily life and they expect the telecom industry to meet the highest standards that the people rightly deserve.
On July 9, Staffieri released a statement attributing to the widespread outage to a network system failure after a maintenance update, adding that the majority of their customers are now back online, according to Global News.
Meanwhile, a consumer group made a request to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission or CRTC to hold an inquiry into the outage.
John Lawford, the executive director of Canada's Public Interest Advocacy Centre, said that the CRTC would be able to get information and documents from Rogers Communications that the public could not access and make recommendations to the company about how to prevent outages in the future.
Lawford told CBC that the outage happening after a routine maintenance is "very suspicious" because the company is expected to do their maintenance in a fashion that would not risk the entire network.
Lawford's organization also asked the CRTC to consider new regulatory responsibilities for all telecommunications providers regarding their communication with customers, ensuring access was maintained to the emergency system like 911, and compensation requirements in case of an outage.
The executive director added that "it would be great if the companies got a roadmap from the CRTC" that said if there is an outage, they are allowed to borrow some part of another network's capacity so they can continue to support essential services during an outage, according to Toronto Star.
Disruptions Are Still Ongoing
A lot of customers said they are still experiencing disruptions, including Courtice, Ontario resident Paul Platt, who told CBC that his home wireless network was only restored after being down for more than 48 hours.
Platt said that several of his appliances at home, including lights, locks, and even smoke detectors, depend on an internet connection to work. He said that nothing was working in his house at all.
Platt added that he checked in on his elderly neighbors, one with Parkinson's disease and another who had heart surgery, every couple of hours, noting that they also rely on Rogers Telecommunications service and would not be able to call 911 if needed.
The resident added that he made a lot of attempts to contact the company through support lines and social media, but he was not able to reach anybody.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Sophie Webster
